Daniel Gilbert has a Ted Talk that brings up a point that I feel is extremely compelling.  Particularly as it challenges a few assumptions that many of us have in regards to our capacities in predicting our future emotions. I will share the quote here as I feel it relates to the topic that we discuss in this episode.

“Here’s two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. So, just give it a moment of thought. You probably don’t feel like you need a moment of thought. Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. … These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you’re hardly five minutes into the lecture. Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.â€

In this episode, I had the wonderful opportunity to speak with Dr. Alan Lambert about his research article that was published in 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. We discuss this article titled “How do you feel now? On the perceptual distortion of extremely recent changes in anger.â€Â  The article provides fascinating insights and evidence related to the above quote, and thus in this interview you can hear a brief discussion Dr. Lambert’s research related to this article. Thank you so much for listening, and for your convenience I have provided the abstract and links to the resources mentioned in this episode below.

Abstract

“Previous research on retrospective biases in emotion has been largely concerned with mistakes that are made when people are asked to recall temporally distant affective experiences (e.g. those that occurred weeks or months ago). However, far less is known about people’s abilities to accurately track extremely recent shifts in affective experience. Across three experiments, we show that people consistently distort perception of a very recent change in anger after being reminded of a historical act of revenge (i.e. the assassination of Osama bin Laden). Consistent with the implications of the “revenge paradox†(Carlsmith, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008) these reminders made participants more angry. However, participants believed that this act of revenge had made them less angry—the exact opposite of what happened—provided that their psychological allegiance to the ingroup had been primed. We discuss the implications of our findings in previous research on the interconnections between emotional experience and social categorization processes (Mackie, Maimer, & Smith, 2009), as well as the role of revenge in protecting the interests of the ingroup (Fehr & Gachter, 2002).”

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

• 
  
• Lambert’s “How do you feel now? On the perceptual distortion of extremely recent changes in angerâ€
  
• Daniel Gilbert’s Ted Talk
  
• Books by Thomas Gilovich
  
• Books by Daniel Gilbert
  
• Books by Timothy Wilson
  

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